Ultimate SEO Posts

Little projects with new clients are often the projects that grow into a real relationship of trust and business.  This post is half freelancer experience and half SEO case study.

Freelancer Experience

Every huge large project I’ve interviewed for has include 50 or more other people seeking the same job on Upwork.  If that wasn’t the case the client didn’t end up doing the pproject and any effort I spent on getting their attention has been a waste.  What has work for me…the small projects.

With the small projects the client basically gets to see what you’re made of in a low stakes kinda way.  Thats the case in my current largest project Openwalls.

The client was looking to buy an existing site that had decent authority in the niche of health.  With my experience in buying and using expired domains I was hired to assess the SEO value of domains available on Flippa and notify the client when I found one worth buying.  What was worth buying?  Honestly hardly nothing on Flippa.  Flippa is stocked to the brim with SEO value 0 sites that have just a generic template thats not even suitable for using the site.  It took months before one popped up that I felt strongly about.  This time gave the client time to work with me and determine if they could trust me for bigger things.

SEO CaseStudy

Openwalls.com seemed to have all the stuff going for it … DA 67 (before DA2.0, still a DA 47 after DA2.0) a total of 8Y age, 548k of backlinks of which 5k were rated quality links.  Trust Flow of 10 which was minimal but a decent Citation Flow of 35. Majestic reports it has 53 referring domains but SEMRush reports 2,611 which I feel Google is more likely to see the higher number as it searches and crawls more that either source. 

After the purchase of openwalls.com which was classified as a health site but was actually a desktop wall paper site I was asked to build it into a health blog over the course of 4 months that could rank well in some core areas.  This has actually become the largest project in the timeframe provided that I’ve set out on.

I’ll write more about the strategy and the effects of various tactics I use on the site’s ranking.  At first now we’re focused on content and building content in the areas where we’d like to rank. At the same time I’m working to extend the site’s social media mentions as well as referring domains and backlinks. I plan to use part of the budget and begin some Adwords campaigns as well to bring in traffic but want to ensure there is content worth reading before I utilize a pay per click campaign.

Some of the content building efforts include ingestion and republishing RSS feeds from others but giving them credit for their content with links to their blog. Having clients related to the health niche write for the blog. Recruiting members of the target audience to be columnist. Writing content myself and purchasing health related content.  I have an SEMRush Marketing Calendar with topics scheduled out for folks to write on as they work for the site, it also provides transparency for the client.  I’m a month in with over 200 articles posted and over 50 pages created.

At this point though hundreds of new backlinks have been made along with multiple expired domains purchased and redirected to relevant similar content pages using 301 redirects.  Treadmills-Reviews.net for instance has 5k backlinks from 107 referring domains, not a huge player but a good opportunity to boost one page’s authority and traffic with 301s.

Generally I expect that my efforts will take about a month to be seen in rankings and keywords. I’ll let you know what happens when something is worth reporting.